Discovering Our Voices

A memoir is a personal story of a memory that has significance in the author’s life.  In 8th grade, we’ve been writing our memoirs for several weeks now.  At the start of our unit, students were asked to brainstorm a list of memories that stand out as critical moments in their lives.  These moments could be about any experience that the author deemed important enough to have changed them in some way.  Perhaps the memory taught them a life lesson, something about themselves, the people in their lives, or the world in general.

In preparation for writing our memoirs, we read several memoirs written by famous authors and not-so-famous students.  Some were funny, like the ones we read from the book “Guys Write for Guys Read.” Other memoirs were more serious.  We read an excerpt from Jean Little’s memoir “Little by Little: A Writer’s Education” about the time when she discovered her love for writing stories, and parts of Gary Paulsen’s memoir called “Guts” which tells about the real life experiences he had that led him to write books about Brian Robeson – “Hatchet” and “Brian’s Winter” etc.  We also read several student memoirs taken from various texts on teaching memoir.

While we wrote and revised and edited our memoirs, I gave several mini-lessons to help students improve the quality of their writing.  We reviewed the rules and did some practice exercises on using quotation marks and the punctuation around them so that we could write effective and easy to understand dialogue.  We learned about paragraphing and when to change paragraphs.  I also gave lessons in using more complex and varied sentence structures.  We will continue to learn more about the ‘craft’ of writing, how to edit, revise and punctuation effectively, throughout the year, of course.

Student memoirs are personal pieces, and although I’d love for you all to read them, I left it to each student to decide whether or not he/she wanted to share these pieces with you on the blog.  I’ve only seen two memoirs posted so far: Zach’s memoir and Cody’s memoir.  Please feel free to share yours with us if you wish.

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Memoir in Song Lyrics!

We also did a short Media Studies unit on memoir in song lyrics.  Many popular songs could be considered of the memoir genre because they speak of significant memories, memories that changed the author’s life in some way or another.  They tell a story, a narrative, of the event(s) and convey to the listener the sense of how they might have influenced the author’s life.

The instructions for this two-part assignment were:

 

Memoir in Song

Assignment #1:
After reading each of the following songs and listening to them in class, answer the following questions about the 2 songs that you like best. Use a separate lined piece of paper. Number your answers. Provide complete answers in full sentences and or paragraphs.
1.  How do the lyrics of this song resemble the genre of memoir? Explain using words and phrases that show you know what a memoir is, and using words and phrases from the song to support your answer.
2.  In one sentence, explain what this song is about.
3.  If you had to choose one favourite line in this song, what would it be and why?
4.  Which of the following techniques commonly used in poetry and song lyrics does this song’s author use effectively? Give examples from the song and explain why the technique is effective in portraying the song’s message. Techniques: repetition, simile, metaphor, symbolism, descriptive language, alliteration, hyperbole.
5.  How would you describe the singer’s voice? How does the voice of the singer compliment the meaning of the song? What is the ‘mood’ of the voice?
6.  How would you describe the music? How does the music compliment the meaning of the song? What is the ‘mood’ of the music?

 

Assignment #2:

My Favourite Memoir Song:
1. Find a song that you like that you consider a ‘memoir song.’
2.  Write blogpost that contains:
a) a video of the vocal artist singing the song
b) the lyrics of the song
c) a three paragraph piece defending your choice of song as a
memoir song.
3.  First paragraph: identify who wrote the song, who is singing it, and tell what you think the song means. Second paragraph: explain why this song could be considered a ‘memoir song.’ Third paragraph: explain what you like about the song, including the author’s craft and use of specific techniques.

OR
Write a Memoir Song:
1.  Use the topic of your memoir or another memory that you think is worthy of a ‘memoir song.’
2. – OPTIONAL – Find a piece of music that you think would fit the mood of your memoir. This piece of music does not have to have song lyrics that fit the genre of memoir.
3.  Write lyrics to your memoir song that will fit with the music you’ve chosen.
Complete a blogpost includes:

a) – OPTIONAL – the name of the music/song you chose and/or a video of the
music/song (only if the original lyrics are appropriate for school).
b) your memoir lyrics

For the first part of the assignment, students to choose to answer the questions on 2 of the following 6 songs that we listened to in class.  I gave each student a copy of the lyrics as well so that they could reread and study these songs for evidence of the genre of memoir, for literary devices and techniques, and in order to better understand the underlying meanings of the songs.  Yes, I’ll admit that at least 5 of the following songs (with the exception of the Taylor Swift song) qualify as real ‘oldies’ but many would agree with me when I say that they’re also ‘goodies’ at least as far as memoir goes.  Here, I’ll just share with you the songs themselves and you be the judge.

 

Cat’s in the Cradle by Cat Stevens

 

Fast Car by Tracy Chapman

Thunder Road by Bruce Springsteen

 

Wide Open Spaces by the Dixie Chicks

 

 

This Shirt by Mary Chapin Carpenter

 

The Best Day by Taylor Swift

 

To give you a sense of the deep level of thinking that this provoked in some 8th grade students, here are some snippets of their responses to my questions about these Memoir Song Lyrics.

In response to “This Shirt” by Chapin Carpenter:

In response to “Best Day” by Swift:

Another response to “Best Day” by Swift:

 

In response to “Fast Car” by Chapman:

 

The second assignment in this unit is still in progress, but hopefully in the near future, you’ll be able to wander through the 8th grade blogs to listen to and appreciate some of the students’ choices for good memoir songs and maybe even read some original memoir songs written by our own 8th graders.

Next up for 8th graders is our Literature Circle Unit.  We’ll talk more about that another day!